i think my brain just said, "LOL. there's no way you can finish that in a week and a half." and since there are so many other things to do right now, i just walked away and did those instead.
today, though, i did some actual work. first, i read some articles on rhetorical agency (for the arab spring project) and took notes on those. some of those notes were about the content. the often-quoted pieces by Geisler seem helpful, as does a tech comm piece by Koerber. but i also took some notes on genre - which should have occurred to me to do long ago. in part, it was because the Koerber piece was so different from the others. tech comm writing is more hard-sciency than, say, comp pedagogy scholarship. i went through and did what i've asked countless students to do, which is to map the articles.
often the introduction has an intro-intro, and then a paragraph functioning as an abstract, with argument and all. usually a preview of the topics or sections. maybe a bit about why this object is worth of study. the body of the article needs to deal with methods - and not just methods, but theoretical frame.
these are things i don't think i've been doing well in my conference papers. i think that, in a lot of ways, i have never been taught how to write an effective seminar paper or scholarly article. i know a well-written one when i'm reading it, but i don't believe, looking back, that my classes put enough emphasis on understanding them thoroughly, and on writing one well. it makes a certain amount of sense, because you've got limited time. and i came to my doctorate new to rhet/comp - i STILL feel new to rhet/comp, which hasn't helped. i know far far more about how to teach in my discipline than i do about how to conduct research in it, or about how to situate myself as a scholar in it.
i don't know, not completely, how to fix this. but as a start, i sat down with the IPS paper and tried to identify some things.
- Methods: Looking at IPS usage in documents, largely available online. Have not made a study of speech acts. Am using a rhetorical approach because analysis shows the logic behind it and b/c of how it turns private reactions into public conversations. Rhetoric also very interested in citizenship.
- Theoretical Frame: Rhetorical scholars Poirot, Eberly, Meagher/DiQuin for their work on how discourse intersects with citizenship and/or feminism. Azoulay for her work on citizenship - using her definition of the term, and her ideas about impaired citizenship.Will need to both write about these people and probably explain why I'm using them.
- Argument: The rhetoric of IPS frames women in ways that limit their citizenship. In part, by making them exceptional (men not vulnerable to the illness, only exceptional women are "cool"), and by requiring them to police themselves and each other. Per Azoulay - when a vulnerability becomes "everyday" it's not the exception - the population is. As well, where citizens are not governed equally, there isn't citizenship. Implications - the term presents itself as describing an isolated situation (girls in all-male settings), as being itself an exception, but I argue that it is instead the normal condition of all women.
this is the clearest sense i have had of this project at any point. i feel like it results in an argument that's far more citizenship-studies than rhetorical-studies, but i think that's okay. this gives me a sense of what i need to write, and what i can cut. i still don't know that i can get this done in 8-9 days.
but it's certainly more likely now than when i was staring with blank despair into the document.
i'm not really ready to think about the long-term yet. i know that i am going to have to keep doing a lot of extra work in order to become the sort of scholar i need to be for the future. but i need to survive finals and this particular conference first.
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